Efficient Spectrum Access and Co-Existence With Receiver Nonlinearity: Frameworks and Algorithms

Radio frequency (RF) front-end nonlinearity significantly impairs receiver performance in non-intuitive ways. Receivers are susceptible to harmful adjacent channel interference, especially in next-generation networks with diverse radio access technologies, co-existing in space, time, and frequency. Vulnerabilities of receiver front-ends can have a severe detrimental effect on network performance and spectrum co-existence. In this paper, we propose centralized controller-based receiver-centric framework for spectrum access that accounts for receiver front-end nonlinearity, pre-selector filter bandwidth, and transmitter out-of-band emission characteristics for networks with diverse RF-layer characteristics. Furthermore, we propose computationally efficient algorithms to optimize the receiver-centric framework and examine network level performance. We demonstrate through extensive network simulations that the proposed receiver-centric framework provides substantially higher spectrum efficiency gains over receiver-agnostic spectrum access and improves co-existence in dense and diverse next-generation wireless networks. We further demonstrate through simulations that the proposed algorithms achieve close to optimal solutions for receiver-centric network optimization.